Zen: what it means, meaning of the term


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Definition of Zen, etymology of the term and what the word deriving from Chinese means and transformed over time following a path that goes up to Buddhism.


Meaning of Zen

The word Zen indicates a group of Buddhist schools that arose in Japan and derive from the Chinese schools of Chán Buddhism, in turn traditionally created taking inspiration from the legendary figure of the Indian monk Bodhidharma.

For this reason, the Chinese traditions Chán, Sòn Korean and Thien Vietnamese are often defined as Zen.


About the origin of the term Zen it must be said that Zen is nothing more than the Japanese pronunciation of a character of the Chinese alphabet.

In many western writings this character is reported in Latin characters with the intention of respecting its Chinese pronunciation, following the pinyin method, translating it into Chán or Wade-Giles Ch’an.

However, it should be remembered that Chán returns the character in Chinese, understood as the official language of the People's Republic of China derived in turn from the Beijing dialect, which was already considered the main language of the Chinese government since the fourteenth century.


Further study reveals that in Middle Chinese the same character was pronounced Zen and that Chinese masters taught Japanese pilgrims to pronounce that character in the same way, as did the Chinese missionaries who lent their work in Japan at the Chan school, where they had come about in the thirteenth century.

This term, which actually derives from the average Chinese language, was used since the birth of Buddhism in China for religious purposes, indicating the various degrees of states of consciousness characterized by exceptional understanding and resulting from a deep meditative concentration.

Later it became a generic definition to classify a typology of religious who had chosen to orient their lives mainly to meditation.


The schools of Zen Buddhism draw their origin from those of Chán Buddhism, founded in China by the Indian monk Bodhidharma, who was a legendary figure highly respected in those places.

According to some theories, these ideologies were transferred to Japan by some Tendai monks who returned home from China, according to another current of thought, they were instead introduced by Chinese monks who worked as missionaries in Japan.

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But Zen Buddhism, as an independent teaching, was slow to spread in Japan because of the difficulties encountered in trying to make Zen autonomous from the Tendai school.

Zen Buddhism in 3 Minutes (February 2024)


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